Thursday, September 24, 2009

Introducing Easy Edit for QuickBooks Online

Today we released a beta version of our new “Easy Edit” feature. You can find it under the Data menu in OE Companion. I’m really excited about this feature, because it eliminates a major pain point of using both QuickBooks Online and OE Companion. If you’re wondering what the heck it does, read on…

Have you ever tried to add or edit a large volume of data in QuickBooks Online? Takes a while, doesn’t it? Actually it takes a while in the desktop version too. I’m certainly not faulting QuickBooks. They have made it about as easy as possible. There just aren’t a lot of good design options for data entry on thousands of customer records that have 50-100 fields each. Similarly, in OE Companion trying to update inventory counts for hundreds or thousands of items individually is quite cumbersome. What you really need is to use software that was built for editing large amounts of data.

So we set out to solve that problem, and we did! Easy Edit is the result. It is a 3-step process:

Download your data to Excel (or another program).

Make your adds/edits in Excel (or another program).

Upload your data back to OE Companion, which then sends it to QuickBooks Online.

It sounds ridiculously simple, and it is. That’s the point. It’s very simple and it’s very fast. This will save you a TON of time if you do lots of data entry with QuickBooks Online. If you are paying someone to do data entry (and I know many of you are!), this feature will save you money. There is no doubt about that.

Right now you can only use Easy Edit for items (products/services), but we’ll have support for other things shortly after we gather some feedback from our users about the way Easy Edit works. Please email me (neal@oecompanion.com) if you have any questions, and be sure to let us know what you think about Easy Edit.